Danny Boyle film welcomes another big response to North East call-out to fill baby roles

Baby applications are booming in response to the latest appeal from filmmakers for help to fill new roles in Danny Boyle's post-apocalyptic movie 28 Years Later.

The casting team behind the Oscar winner's new feature film which is being made in the North East are on the look-out for newborn babies to appear in imminent scenes and again they have been amazed at the immediate response to the call-out. There already have been opportunities for hundreds of local people to take up the wide range of extra roles required for the film's long shoot and these have have included a previous call-out through a Chroniclelive story to find babies for particular scenes which resulted in more than 100 applications within hours.

From those, the film's casting department selected two "adorable" newly-born babies for a day shoot on Holy Island. And now, with the need for featured babies to appear a consistent age, there has been another urgent call-out to fill the two roles which again has attracted huge interest.

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The casting agency had received 16 applications in little more than two hours of the latest Chronicleive story about the available baby roles - and the number shot up to 30-plus overnight. Candy Marlowe, the film's second assistant director in charge of crowd scenes, is delighted at the response.

The roles are for babies of either sex due to be born this week or next, or weighing no more than six pounds or so, and the chosen new recruits will feature in scenes due to be shot over two days. Filming on 28 Years Later got under way in Northumberland in May and is now set to expand across the region, with the baby scenes set to take place in the Newcastle area.

The film, whose cast is said to star Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Cillian Murphy - who played Jim in Boyle's original 28 Days Later - plus Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes and Jack O'Connell, has been hit by the bad weather to date, with a day on Holy Island being particularly hard hit.

Candy says: "We did have quite a scary day on Holy Island with a storm and relentless rain - fortunately we were filming inside that day." But they had some decent weather while they were on Lindisfarne too.

She adds: "We were so lucky with our biggest crowd filming day on Holy Island, with our local crowd of adults and children, when the sun shone all day. Overall, I think we have been quite lucky.

"We have had to film between showers a bit but otherwise carried on. The midges have been the biggest pain!"